Creators of BetterMe App

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BetterMe has been inching up the “Top New Free” apps list under the category productivity. We are currently at number 66. We have moved up 60 spots since the last update! Thanks for your support. Keep telling everyone about it!

BetterMe started off as an alarm clock and now it’s turned into a productivity app using public humiliation as a motivator to get us places on time and to help achieve our goals.

So you may be wondering what next. First we would like to expand our social media options. We will be integrating Twitter and Google+. Along with this, we would like to allow the user to create a group based on their contact list, and then to use SMS to alert those contacts in the group.

We have been thinking about the use of public humiliation as a means for motivation and we feel that we are missing the exact opposite which could be considered to be a bit more effective. We want to create automatic messages for successful outcomes. That’s right; we want to use positive reinforcement too. I message posted to cheer you on after consecutive achievements in goals, non-snoozes, or appointments.

When we have the tools to track usage per user, this will also mean we can provide graphical reports too. We feel productivity junkies are obsessed with metrics and so wouldn’t it be great to track wake up times, successive days gone without being late, goals met versus missed? We think so.

Some new features we have in mind include habit building with daily, weekly, monthly, yearly reminders. We also want to help users create mission statements. This can be done by parsing roles, and asking the user “how” and “what” they will do to achieve their ideal vision for each role.

Today is the official launch of BetterMe Version 2. This includes feature updates and an Android version. Update or download the app, and rate us too. Please help us get the word out by sharing this post!

BetterMe is an app for people who will try anything to better themselves. The app uses public humiliation to help keep your appointments, to achieve your goals, and to jump out of bed in the mornings.

Features include an alarm clock, goal tracking, and GPS check-ins system to keep your recurring appointments. If you fail, each of these features will humiliate you by posting a message on your Facebook wall.

GPS Check-ins: First input the address and time of your gym, class, or work schedule. Then the app will use GPS to check if you arrived at your destination on time. If not, then you will be shamed on Facebook!

Goals: Goals are announced on Facebook. It asks your friends to hold you accountable. The app will later ask if you have achieved your goal and if not then you will be shamed on Facebook.

Alarm: Snooze this alarm clock and receiving a shaming immediately.

Android

iPhone

What an adventure. Such a simple concept yet so much attention! It’s been a little over 100 days, and so we thought it would be fun to go over some usage statistics along with some of our different marketing efforts. Let’s start off with the statistics!

Downloads

According to iTunes Connect, we’ve had 3,200 downloads and we’re on pace to reach 10,000 in a years time. BetterMe has some international fanfare. Check out the breakdown of users per country:

Mexico

480

Brazil

29

Canada

309

Ukraine

29

Japan

166

Colombia

26

Russia

165

Morocco

19

France

159

Turkey

16

Armenia

147

Algeria

16

Australia

139

Peru

15

United Kingdom

127

Chile

14

Spain

71

Qatar

14

China

62

Israel

13

Taiwan

56

United Arab Emirates

10

Germany

52

Tunisia

8

Venezuela

41

South Africa

8

Jordan

36

New Zealand

6

Looks like 2nd most users come from Mexico while 3rd and 4th are in Japan and Russia.

Surprisingly the most downloaded day does not correlate with the day we had the most traffic to our site. This occurred on April 30th with about 200 visits. Peculiarly we only had 22 downloads that day which is below our average. The majority of the traffic came from Facebook. Again peculiar because this was well above the average and yet we cannot figure out why. Below you can see our Facebook Insights for that day:

As you can see above we posted a link to our blog post on our Facebook page that day. You will also notice in our next graph that we didn’t have a extraordinary day creating Facebook posts through our app.

Facebook Status Updates

Our next statistic is our favorite. This one comes from Facebook and it tells us how many status updates our app has created for users:

On March 16th we had the most status updates created in one day at 37. That means we had 37 separate snoozers that day!

Marketing

Facebook advertising

Facebook has been a great source of on demand downloads. From our analysis the cost per download is around $0.50. I think it helped that our app has a novelty feel and beyond that it was easy writing a catchy ad:

The ad was marketed for those on the iOS and strictly from the phone. We did not filter the adds with any other demographics at first, but towards the end we were interested seeing the impact of marketing towards teenagers (inconclusive due to budgeting issues).

We haven’t experimented with maxing out budgets, but it’s good to know that downloads are available if we choose to increase our marketing budget.

Google Advertising

We tried advertising with Google Adwords, but we realized it cost a bit more than Facebook. We focused our campaign to strictly the iOS platform. Here are some of the statistics:

During that time period, we had an average of 37 downloads per day. Our average without advertising at the time period was roughly around 20 downloads per day. So at $20.00 a day, Google Adwords was costing us $1.00 per download.

Fiverr.com

We tried fiverr.com to see what kind of impact social media would have. There are many promoters on fiverr.com, and after sifting through and weeding out the ones that looked like spammers we went with 2 individuals who would Tweet, blog, and post on Facebook a blurb about our app. Each cost $5 dollars and so we sat back and watched. We had about 151 downloads on that day. I don’t know if all can be attributed to the two fiverr promoters, but they must have had an impact. Here is one of the blog posts:

Organic

Our goal is to not to buy a user base. We believe that the app is inherently social and through organic marketing efforts we can grow quite large. Along with this, we believe in slow and steady effort focusing on the future of our brand. We have just begun blogging. Over the past two months we have already seen an increase in organic traffic to our site (too soon to impact app downloads).

We have been on Twitter and Facebook from day one. Our goal is to connect with individuals on a personal level over the social airwaves rather than posting into the void. We have generated deep relations with a small group of fans and we will continue to nurture this fact. One by one we will continue to push for connections as if it’s a grass roots social media campaign.

Conclusion

It’s been a wonderful learning experience. There are some things we would have done differently from day one. For instance, we should have been collecting emails from the app. Our email list is very small, and this means we have no way of updating our customers! This has already been fixed with version 2.

Also we would have started promoting and blogging even before the app was made. We spent 3 months building the app without ever telling the world about it. There is no need for this and it’s really important to generate some buzz before launching.

We are excited about the next 100 days and hopefully we can write one of these again with larger figures. Wish us luck!

It’s official, we will be launching the Android version of BetterMe on May 19th. That is 12 days from now! More impressively the Android version will include 2 new features:

GPS Check-ins: First input your gym, class, or work schedule (address and time). Then the app will use GPS to check if you arrived at your destination on time. If not, then you will be shamed on Facebook!

Goals: Goals are announced on Facebook. It asks your friends to hold you accountable. The app will later ask if you have achieved your goal and if not then you will be shamed on Facebook.

Stay tuned for further announcements. Also don’t forget to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter here: betteremapp.co

We believe that if we want to become better whether we want to feel better, become more successful however it’s defined, become healthier or wealthier, it is in our control to do so.

This will be achieved by using any tool that can help us. We will challenge ourselves and push ourselves to a higher standard. We will share our dreams and failures with everyone. We will be honest, fair, and sincere with ourselves, our co-workers and anyone we make dealings with.

As we celebrate our successes we will always support yours. We will award our employees and users for reaching their goals through prizes or recognition. Shaming of failures will be lighthearted and fun.

Our goal is to provide knowledge through the spread of educational content. We will hold ourselves to a higher standard in quality of topics and research. We will donate to further research human development and mental health.

Accordingly, it is our wish to provide our users with college scholarships once a year. We will provide growth opportunities to anyone involved in BetterMe by either providing career opportunities or further their education through certification or higher education.

Technology will be central to all progress. We will continue to innovate tools internally along with those for the public. Internal tools of high use will be made available to the public either through sale or open source.

Never forget your community. We will take part in community services chosen by employees. We will support local homeless and mentally ill because a society is best judged by how they treat those who have it worst.